he title of Orson Scott Card's new Ender novel passes any
test for truth in advertising. The protagonist of the book--a
preternaturally sharp child named Bean who originally shadowed Ender
Wiggin in Ender's Game (1985)--shadows him here. And the book
itself is a shadow of its famous predecessor, the novel that signalized
Card's irruption into the world of SF. Ender's Game was not the first
full-length book he ever wrote; but the heart of it is a revision of
"Ender's Game" (Analog 1977), which was indeed his first SF
publication.
So Ender's Shadow, by retelling the inception of Card's career,
shadows all of it. This is a dangerous enterprise for an author of merit.
He becomes his own evil twin.
The story itself, Card avers, "should work as well for readers
who have never read Ender's Game as for those who have read it several
times." As a reader who has gone through Ender's Game only once, though
virtually in one sitting, I must say this is nonsense. Ender's Shadow
is of interest almost exclusively as precisely a shadow of something else.
Tiny young preternaturally clever Bean is a street waif in savage
uncaring Rotterdam (I do not recollect from my own reading of the Ur-text
why Card chose to slur the Dutch in this fashion, and nothing in the
current tale offers any argument for the total collapse of one of the
finest and most efficient welfare states in the world). He transforms the
street gang he belongs to into an efficient unit, though at the cost of
incurring the enmity of a lame "bully" known as Achilles, who will
develop into a serial killer (and, though seemingly killed off in this
volume, a potential adversary in some future installment). Already Bean is
beginning to show the strategic genius--the profound sense of place--that
will make him second only to Ender himself in the annals of human history.
An attempted invasion
The nun who feeds Bean also engineers his recruitment to the Battle
School in space, where Ender is already forging ahead in the various
games that simulate human battles against the Buggers, an alien race
which had mounted an unsuccessful invasion of Earth many years earlier,
and whose home world a human armada is now approaching for the final
battle.
Bean soon susses out the relationship between teachers and
students at the Battle School, and begins to home in on Ender's
situation, which he eventually comes fully to understand. He understands
Ender's quality as a leader, and his balletic strategic genius; he
identifies the devious and frequently cruel tests Ender's teachers lay on
his shoulders in order to shape him for his ultimate task, which is to
act as supreme commander at the final battle; he works out well in
advance that Ender will in fact play that final battle, via the
instantaneous communications network of the ansible (a device invented by
Ursula K Le Guin to dodge Einsteinian constraints without sounding
utterly foolish); and finally understands that Ender must not himself be
allowed to know that his game is for real, that whole civilizations will
rise or fall according to his moves.
All this is, of course, familiar stuff. It is like being behind
the arras of the previous book. But Ender's Shadow is constructed with
such narrative cunning that one can forget for pages on end that Card's
only line of suspense is to make us wonder how much faster than anyone
expects Bean will work out what's really happening to Ender Wiggin. In
the end, therefore, Ender's Shadow concerns itself almost entirely with
working out the plot of the book it shadows. In the end--though we
remember almost everything that Bean jumps the gun on--we do all the same
allow the cunning of Card. We continue to read.
A close call
It is at points, all the same, a close call. It is really very
hard indeed to swallow Sister Carlotta, a supernaturally savvy Catholic
nun who finds Bean, works out that he (like Ender himself) is a genetic
experiment, flummoxes the entire command structure of the Battle School
by knowing before they do what they're on about, etc. In a book already
full of history-changing six-year-old-boy heroes who'd make Carlisle
blush (along with passing references to Ender's world-changing siblings),
a history-changing nun heroine is a thesis--that history is shaped by
extraordinary individuals--too far.
Bean himself is a hero in a mold we already recognize. He's not
unlike Ender himself, in many ways; but, especially at times when his
weltschmerz ascends godwards, he more significantly resembles Gordon R.
Dickson's greatest creation, Donal Graeme, the small tough strategic
genius whose grasp of strategy is paranormal, and who dominates all
40 years of the Dorsai saga. He cannot, in other words, be taken
with a straight face.
The ultimate failure of Ender's Shadow does not lie in the
occasional failure in the cunning of its telling, moments when (for
instance) the inevitability of Bean's shadowing-in-advance of the original
story become very nearly tedious; the ultimate failure is a failure of
philosophy. It is a failure that is, therefore, almost impossible to pin
down: because bad philosophy tends to make good story. It is fun to
have heroes in a book (it is less fun actually to meet General Patton).
It is fun to have Ender's Shadow; but it would be very much less fun
to live in the shadow its heroes would impose upon a real world.
So. Ender's Shadow is great fun. And a dreadful warning from
the twin within.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. He is also a co-founder of the Hugo-winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list.
